Next Practice

We at space150 recently challenged ourselves to rethink how we answer the common question: “What’s the best practice?”

What started as an exercise in overturning the term “best practice” turned into a discussion about having empowered conversations. We searched for a more empowering response to the question by taking the opportunity to have better conversations about our capabilities as marketers, designers, and developers. By exploring some approaches to properly answer the question, we can look ahead and even leapfrog an established practice for something entirely new and different.

Something entirely new and different

Our first reaction was to turn the question around and ask it in a new way. When asked, “What’s the best practice?” let’s shift the conversation to “What’s the space150 way?” Let’s seize the opportunity to crush an overused convention and create a new one.

Our initial conclusion (after a 10-minute conversation among four of us and an all-company e-mail string): We don’t do “best practice,” we do “next practice.” Ahh, nice. But we’re not the first ones to think of that.

I’d like to give the credit to the late C.K. Prahalad, who coined “next practice” first in a 2004 article¹, in addition to a few other industry-standard terms. Study his work. You won’t regret it.

“Dr. Prahalad, who began his career as an engineer in his native India, applied bold and original approaches to a wide range of business practices and economic issues, including corporate culture, consumerism, innovation, marketing and poverty. In explaining his ideas, he coined such now-standard terms of the business lexicon as “core competencies,” “strategic intent” and “the bottom of the pyramid,” which describes business opportunities among the world’s poor.”²

He was the original next practice guy.

Cool. We found out that next practice is already out there as an alternative term. We can use it. But we had also discovered that simply rebranding the term “best practice” in space150-speak was not the goal.

The goal was to come up with a way to answer the question and still deliver something innovative. So let’s evaluate the question.

Evaluate the question

When we are asked to provide examples of a best practice for “X” (particular interactions, branding approaches, marketing methods, engineering exercises, etc.) we are being asked specifically to go find examples of things that have already been done.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t always like to go find things that have already been done just to do something similar. Sometimes (maybe most of the time) it’s the right thing to do. But it doesn’t always feel right to go find the safe stuff, especially at an agency like ours where revolution is in our blood. We seek opportunities to destroy convention on our way to new discoveries, designs, recommendations, and capabilities.

Turns out it’s not the question that’s the problem, it’s the answer. We’re happy to do research and back up a tried-and-true approach with data. We’ll valiantly defend status quo examples because they’ve been measured, evaluated, and therefore “proven,” but that doesn’t change the fact that when you seek out a best practice example you’re tracking down a method that’s not new. We should make sure we answer with examples that are best for a reason.

Best that’s best for a reason

Here are three basic, well-known best practices:

In e-commerce the user-friendly approach of allowing customers to purchase without first registering for the site has become best practice.
In using social media, a best practice is to ask questions and don’t always talk about yourself.
When writing, it’s best practice to use headings, bulleted lists, and bold type to make text easy for the reader to scan.

Best practice is hard to argue with, and often not necessary. But we should still ask: Are there opportunities to improve? Sometimes we refer to a best practice that is years old. Does that make the opportunity to overturn it that much greater?

Empower yourself to do next practice design, but don’t stop referencing what’s been done. Here’s how: Reference the approach, not the solution.

Reference the approach, not the solution

The approach is the best practice; the solution is the next practice. Reference moments of change and innovation, and label the approach as best practice, rather than the innovations that result from it.

Take the case of Mint vs. Wesabe in the competition for free online personal finance software, and Wesabe co-founder Marc Hedlund’s awesomely open observations about his site’s failure to succeed. Mr. Hedlund admits Wesabe had a best practice approach to the usability of their interface, while Mint was ahead of the game:

“I was focused on trying to make the usability of editing data as easy and functional as it could be; Mint was focused on making it so you never had to do that at all.”³

Wesabe’s is an example of a best practice approach that, despite all the research, logic, and reason that supported it, failed to beat the competition. It happens. Innovation and safe approaches don’t always play happily together.

This is the heart of my argument against simply answering the best practice question with examples. The best practice approach leads to next practice design.

Best practice approach leads to next practice design

Mint.com is commonly referenced as an industry best practice. We do it all the time. But it’s not their interface that’s the best practice, even though that gets most of the attention. It’s their approach to solving the problem.

When I reference Mint as a best practice, I’m not referring to their interface. My answer to the best practice question isn’t “The best practice in this situation is to design some cool-looking graphs and make sure they’re readable and easy to use.”

My answer is “The best practice in this situation would be to adopt the Mint-style approach of eliminating usability burdens altogether. This will free us to be innovative and come up with a next practice solution that’s customized for your needs.”

Don’t make the current experience better. Design an experience people never knew they needed.

¹ Prahalad, C.K. and Ramaswamy, Venkat. “Co-creation Experiences: The Next Practice in Value Creation.” Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18(3): 5. 2004.

² http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/20/AR2010042005075.html

³ http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint